As marketers, we’re focused on the visibility drive to keep our brand awareness higher but is that the only purpose that we need to accomplish? As practitioners for many years, if we ask ourselves what we really do in our profession is to simplify the consumer journey by helping them to make fast and easy decisions. Brands we promote are supposed to be the metal short-cut to their multiple pain points. Isn’t it?
Whichever brands that come to our mind during such pain points or let’s say, while buying is what we generally choose to purchase making us realized that top-of-the-mind recall might be the most important job we do.
The famous quote by Walter Landor says, “Products are produced in the factory, but brands are produced in the minds of the consumer.”
The statement reinforces that marketing is a mind game unlike sales which determines the actual area specific market share for that particular brand. So is mental availability the most important thing for any branding activities.
For me, mental availability is about making our brand known and bolstering its recall during purchase. İncreasingly, metal availability is arguable most important goal we should have as marketeers making our brand easily recall in any buying position bringing more efficacy to what we do. Now how do we achieve this is the key question. Is brand awareness and visibility drive the only solution or are there better ways to have higher share of mind?
Experts say, brands need to owned as many relevant neurons in the consumer’s minds as they possibly can to achieve this higher share of mind.
Truth be told, awareness is not enough for metal availability – with awareness, buyers know you exist in the market. They may have heard about the brand but that does not mean they think about the brand in their buying position or such pain points. Which is why, it is more important to be connected in the consumers minds with certain emotions associated with the brand than the sheer name or awareness that exist in the market. I see this as a case in point for many Nepali brands particular in construction segments when they invest huge amount in creating name recognitions by driving visibility largely through OOH giving larger impact and name/logo recognitions. Name recognition might be very relevant during the initiation introductory phase of Product Life Cycle (PLC) but operating in hugely competitive market with over 20 brands this itself becomes a challenge as they move beyond the introductory period and have continuous business objectives to achieve over the years. That might be a reason why there are continuous introduction of new brands in the segment and these new brands are always able to take good share of markets from relatively establish or older brands as they are not able to build the emotional connect with the consumers.
What is the solution?
The solution is to work towards creating brand salience as it helps to connect with relevant neurons in the consumer minds. Brand salience is more advanced than awareness and helps in the process of building brand equity. If the brand has a higher salience, that means, it will help to create right impression in the consumer mind when they are actually in the buying position. Many consumer brands have been able to achieve this state across the globe as they believe in creating central theme and reinforce that theme through stories, activations and activities consistently over a period of time. Some of the iconic brand themes created by key sporting brands which often appeal to our desire to be better versions of ourselves by challenging us with the powerful taglines like – “Impossible is Nothing”, “Just do it”, “Forever Faster” etc. These brand themes for sport brands appeal to consumer’s desires for self-betterment reflecting on changing society’s value system for achievement and success. Likewise, there is a lot of good work from Indian subcontinent which is able to achieve similar success and even get recognized at the global forums including work that got recognized at Cannes Lions.
In the meantime, not to forget the role of “empathy” to create brand salience which has been central to many globally successful works by the brands in last few years particular in the post pandemic world as humans are becoming more sensitive towards subjects that has larger impact in the global issues. We having been talking about shared economy – knowledge, opinions and views. The hyper-connected world is increasingly providing more avenues to amplify these behaviors. A happy person helps to attract & engage another person towards the product, idea or the brand. The idea is to have open relationships and creativity will help to flourish the “empathy” further and all the consumer touchpoints need to be creatively humanized.
Therefore, we can see that brands with the highest mind share have typically the highest share of sales. The brands that come to our mind easily are the brands that get bought each time consumers are purchasing. Honestly, as marketeers, our primary goal, is to get our brand into as many consideration sets as we possibly can, connecting them to as many relevant neurons in the consumers mind.
Views Expressed are Personal.
